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You can analyse your competitors’ backlink profiles for free in Bing Webmaster Tools. In the Backlinks report you can see the domains, pages and anchor texts linking to your site, and in the comparison tab you can set your profile against up to two other sites. The ‘domains not linking to my site’ filter gives you a ready-made list of link building opportunities, and you can export the data to a file.
There are several tools you can use to analyse inbound links – apart from Google Search Console, which handles this at best poorly – for example the popular Ahrefs, the somewhat forgotten Majestic, Semrush, which some consider the best link analysis tool, or Senuto (a Polish SEO platform), which has added a link analysis module to its toolkit.
These tools – GSC aside – are handy because you can look up any website, check its stats and download the data you need. Their only ‘problem’ is that full access to link analysis costs money:
- Ahrefs – paid plans; for free (Ahrefs Free, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) you mainly see links to your own verified sites,
- Semrush – paid plans,
- Majestic – paid plans,
- Senuto – paid plans.
Prices and limits change often, so check the current figures on each vendor’s pricing page. But let’s not dwell on that now – especially since basic data on inbound links, including links to your competitors’ sites, is available… completely free!
Meet Bing Webmaster Tools!
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is a free Microsoft tool that lets website owners monitor and optimise their sites’ visibility in Bing search. Much like Google Search Console, it offers a range of features that help you understand how the search engine sees your site, which errors may be dragging its rankings down and which keywords bring in traffic.
What makes Bing Webmaster Tools stand out?
One of the main things that sets Bing Webmaster Tools apart is the Backlinks report, which shows which websites link to yours. More importantly, in the same report you can analyse links pointing to competitors’ sites – without verifying those domains – which gives you valuable clues about where to get new links. BWT also reports on indexing and lets you submit XML sitemaps.
Beyond that, you’ll find a site scan for SEO issues (Site Scan), URL inspection, support for the IndexNow protocol for quickly submitting new, changed and deleted URLs, a built-in AI assistant (Copilot) and – since February 2026, in preview – the AI Performance report, which shows how often content from your site is cited as a source in Microsoft Copilot answers and AI summaries in Bing.
Advantages over Google Search Console
When it comes to links, the biggest advantage of Bing Webmaster Tools is that you can analyse backlinks not only for your own site but also for your competitors’ – in Google Search Console, the Links report only shows data for your verified property. Bing also gives you a more detailed view of inbound links, and its link profile comparison tool can be extremely useful in SEO.
The Bing Webmaster Tools interface is also sometimes considered easier to use than Google Search Console – though that’s really a matter of habit.
Disadvantages compared with Google Search Console
Bing Webmaster Tools does have its limits, though. The most important one is Bing’s smaller share of the search market compared with Google. For most websites Google drives far more traffic than Bing, which makes analysis in Google Search Console more important for your overall SEO strategy. Also bear in mind that BWT shows the links Bing knows about – it’s not a complete picture of every link on the web.
Another drawback is that it has fewer features for indexing and site errors than Google Search Console. GSC offers more extensive reports on indexing, page performance and structured data.
Link analysis in Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)
First things first: verify your site in BWT. There are several ways to do it – from adding a meta tag, through uploading a verification file to your server or adding the right CNAME record to your domain’s DNS, all the way to verifying through… Google Search Console! What’s more, if you choose to import from GSC, you can import all your domains/properties in one go, or just the ones you pick. If you look after dozens or hundreds of sites, importing them into Bing Webmaster Tools takes literally a few seconds!
Importing from GSC only works for sites you’ve already verified in Google. If you haven’t done that yet, start with my guide on how to add a site to Google Search Console. Also remember that after you add a new site, Bing may need up to 48 hours to prepare the data and reports.
Analysing inbound links in Bing Webmaster Tools
Let’s get straight to the point. BWT has a few interesting modules and useful bits of information, but if you’re not convinced that Bing is a place worth growing your own or your client’s site in, they probably won’t help you much. What will help is the module called ‘Backlinks’ (the screenshots below show the Polish interface, where it’s labelled ‘Łącza przychodzące’).
You’ll find it at https://www.bing.com/webmasters/backlinks or by clicking the relevant option in the tool’s side menu.
The view itself is no fireworks display. Just a list of links pointing to the site you’ve verified. From what I’ve seen, the data is good enough to start with. It’s certainly not as precise as what commercial tools offer. Bear in mind, too, that Bing Webmaster Tools won’t give you charts and graphs showing the distribution, quality or type of individual links. But paid tools are paid tools.
Still, by clicking any link you can check exactly which URL the link sits on and which anchor text points to your site!
Note the ‘Download all’ button above this detailed table. It can be a really useful option for a more in-depth analysis of your site and where its links come from.
Back to the tool’s main view: you can choose between three ways of filtering the data:
Domains lists every domain that has a link pointing to your site. It’s a good way to get a general picture of where your links are.
Pages is a much more detailed view. You get a long list of all the links/URLs pointing to your site. Got site-wide links? Well, expect every page found to show up in this view. I strongly recommend downloading this data to a separate file and sorting it, because in BWT itself it’s hard to read. Besides the URL, you also get the linked anchor text and the target URL.
Anchor text, in turn, is a view that shows all the anchor texts your site is linked with, along with how many times each one was found.
Of course, all this data can be exported to a file, and you can ‘drill into’ most items on the list to check details such as the source, or even go straight to the page that links to you. It doesn’t sound like much, but it can give you a lot of important information.
Comparing my site’s backlinks with competitors in Bing Webmaster Tools
Time for the most important feature: comparing your links with your competitors’. To get there, choose the ‘Backlinks To Any Site’ tab at the top, under the ‘Backlinks’ heading. (In the Polish interface it’s called ‘Linki wsteczne do dowolnej witryny internetowej’ – a lovely, concise name that couldn’t possibly be any shorter or more obvious.) Either way, you can compare your website with any other site Bing has indexed – competitors’ sites don’t need to be verified.
You can pick your direct competitors or addresses completely out of left field. Want to compare the link profile of Onet (a big Polish news portal) with nasa.gov? No problem. By far the best approach, though, is to compare your site with sites that – in your view – have a stronger backlink profile. That way you can build a ‘starter’ list of places where you should appear too.
How to approach a backlink comparison in BWT
When you open the tool, you’ll see a view that politely invites you to enter the address of the site you want to look at.
Click the plus sign labelled ‘Add site to compare’ and type in the address you want to examine. You can choose up to 3 domains in total (yours and at most two others) to compare. The tool also suggests similar sites you can pick competitors from.
In this view the devil is in the detail. At the top you’ll see the total number of referring domains and anchor texts for each site, and below that a list of ‘Top referring domains’. That alone lets you make some observations about how each site gets its links. On the other hand – where has the ‘Download all’ button gone?! And that’s exactly the detail I mean.
Further down the view you can pull out other data too, namely ‘Top anchor text’. Under each of these lists/tables you’ll also find a ‘View detailed report’ link. Clicking it takes you to a view listing all the domains (the default view) used to link to the three sites you selected:
Can you see it too? There’s the ‘Download all’ button 💛. What’s more, by clicking into individual Referring domains you can check where the link sits. You just have to select the right domain being analysed. If you don’t, you’ll get an empty result.
You can filter the list further. And no, these aren’t filters like ‘alphabetical’ or ‘most popular first’. Oh no. When Microsoft does something, it does it in the most common-sense way imaginable.
The list filters let you show all domains, only the common ones (linking to all the selected sites) or only those that don’t link to your verified domain. Yes, finding link opportunities is even easier than you might have expected!
What does a CSV export from Bing Webmaster Tools look like?
I’ve mentioned the ‘Download all’ button a few times. Does it let you download all the data? Including the exact URLs where each link sits? Unfortunately not. To get details of exactly where the link to a site is placed on a given domain, you have to click into the domain you’re interested in and either download that data or browse it in Bing Webmaster Tools itself.
The export itself looks like this:
It contains all the domains Bing has found. You don’t have to jump through hoops like in GSC to download more than 1,000 rows. I downloaded a sheet with 1,000 domains without any trouble. I’m not sure what to make of this export, though. In the analyses of Onet or WP (two of the largest Polish portals) you’ll find lots of sites of varying quality. But I have a feeling that more than 500 domains link to Onet, and more than 1,002 to Google and NASA.
Even so, it’s hard to say the data Bing collects is useless. As a starting point it’s close to ideal. Information about your competitors and their links at absolutely no cost. Building a link plan from scratch, and for nothing, has never been easier!
Competitor backlink analysis in BWT, step by step
- Add and verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (the quickest way is importing from GSC).
- Go to Backlinks and look through the Domains, Pages and Anchor text views for your own site.
- Switch to the Backlinks To Any Site tab and add up to two competitor sites.
- Open ‘View detailed report’ and set the filter to domains that don’t link to your site.
- Download the list (‘Download all’), and for the most interesting domains check the exact URLs and anchor texts.
- Assess the quality and topical relevance of the domains – not every place your competitors get links from is worth a link.
The list from BWT is good input, but it won’t replace assessing your link profile in the context of your whole strategy. If you’d like me to analyse your site and its competitive landscape, see what an SEO audit looks like.
FAQ – link analysis in Bing Webmaster Tools
Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?
Yes. Bing Webmaster Tools is free – all you need is an account (Microsoft, Google or Facebook) and a verified site.
Can you check competitors’ backlinks in Bing Webmaster Tools?
Yes. In the Backlinks report you can compare your site with up to two other sites and see their referring domains and anchor texts. You don’t need to verify competitors’ sites – only yours has to be verified.
Does Google Search Console show competitors’ backlinks?
No. The Links report in GSC only shows links to your verified property. To look at competitors’ links for free, Bing Webmaster Tools does the job well.
Is the link data in BWT complete?
No. BWT shows the links Bing has found, and the export doesn’t include the exact URLs for all domains at once. It’s a good, free starting point, but paid tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic) usually have bigger link databases and more metrics.
Can you disavow links in Bing Webmaster Tools?
No. Bing retired the Disavow Links tool in October 2023, explaining that its algorithms recognise and ignore unnatural links on their own.
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